“Fraud” Is the Magic Word Trump Is Using to Strip Impoverished Americans of Social Services

Before the presidencies of Donald Trump, and the unprecedented political polarization that followed, in which a new level of stubborn tribalism made the changing of American opinions on any subject a complete impossibility, it was widely assumed that a President could not afford to be seen as openly vengeful against his perceived enemies. The thought was that the endless swells of impressionable, free-thinking and good-hearted Americans in “the middle” wouldn’t stand for such a shallow display of petty partisanship. The concept of a President choosing to punish specific states that didn’t vote for him, while rewarding the ones that did, would have been unthinkable political suicide. But when you manage to entirely breed empathy out of the American soul, isolate them in a digital hellscape, and convince the majority of people that all that matters is their tribe exerting dominance over the other, literally anything becomes acceptable with the barest of justification. And when it comes to taking away critical social services and lifesaving funding from millions upon millions of Americans who desperately need it, all Trump or his lackeys apparently need to say at this point is the word “fraud,” in order to get half the country to immediately fall in line.

Today, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services would be freezing “$10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services and cash support for low-income families,” concentrated entirely in blue states: New York, California, Illinois, Colorado, and notably, Minnesota. This missing funding will include $7 billion for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which funnels cash to low-income households with young children, and $2.4 billion for the Child Care Development Fund, which helps working families afford the high costs of childcare. There will also be an additional $870 million frozen for grants that “mostly benefit children at risk.” This is in addition to the administration freezing $185 million in annual aid to Minnesota day care centers statewide last week, in response to more of the fraud allegations that have embroiled the state government in controversy since indictments and prosecution related to pandemic-era abuses of social programs were first unveiled in 2022–a scandal that right-wing provocateurs have recently revived to use as a cudgel against Minnesota’s Somali population, and prop up Trump’s overall anti-immigration agenda.

Not present in the Trump administration’s rationale for freezing funding to the likes of California, New York, Illinois and Colorado? That would be any specific evidence or accusations of fraud of any kind. They have quite literally just stated that because widespread fraud was uncovered (and then prosecuted by the Biden DOJ) in Minnesota, that it must also be happening in any other large, populous state that did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020 or 2024. This is the entirety of the bar that must be cleared, in order to withhold $10 billion in funding for the poorest Americans, in Trump admin 2.0–someone said the word “fraud,” so therefore all social programs are effectively nuked. The implication, of course, is not only that the federal government had no burden to prove that fraud is happening via indictments or convictions before punishing the citizens of an entire state, but also that fraud is only possible in blue states. After all, actually enforcing the law against fraudsters in a battleground state and shutting off federal social services dollars there might cost Donald Trump voters who matter in our broken electoral system, and we can’t have that. Our President and his officials continue to treat Americans like they’re painfully stupid, people who have been rendered incapable of detecting hypocrisy or responding negatively to pettiness.

“Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said Andrew Nixon, a mouthpiece for the Department of Health and Human Services tasked with explaining why millions of low-income Americans would go hungry without the government needing to provide any evidence of wrongdoing. “Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes.”

Fraud was the excuse: this is the real goal, revealed – reduce safety net funding, but only in blue states.

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— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) Jan 6, 2026 at 9:53 AM

This is not to say that fraud does not exist, because it very obviously does, woven into the fabric of our society. The pandemic in particular was its own little golden age of American federal fraud, involving untold and unprecedented dollar totals being siphoned off from legitimate support programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. The Small Business Administration’s inspector general has estimated that more than $200 billion of the more than $1.2 trillion in pandemic-era loans awarded by the agency went to “potentially fraudulent actors,” only a fraction of which has since been prosecuted or recovered. It should go without saying that the perpetrators hail from all sides of the political spectrum, although Trump has personally pardoned the likes of Lawrence Duran, convicted of $205 million in Medicaid fraud, even as he harps on fraud in blue states.

It’s also accurate to say that fraud ran wild in the state of Minnesota in particular, despite the partisan impulse of left-leaning media outlets to attempt to write it off. Federal prosecutors have charged 98 people in the state with felony fraud cases related to social services programs since 2022, with potential totals in stolen cash (mostly reimbursements for services never given) likely reaching beyond a staggering $1 billion in taxpayer money. Roughly 60% of those cases have resulted in convictions. The large presence of Minnesota residents of Somali descent among the defendants, mostly American citizens by birth or naturalization, is the reason why the MAGA right has glommed onto the story so intently, but this ready-made topic for convenient racism aimed at the wider Minnesota Somali community (80,000 people) and U.S. immigrants in general unsurprisingly leaves out crucial context. Like, for instance, the fact that the ringleader and founder of the largest Minnesota fraud case was a white American woman, Aimee Bock, who just so happened to be employing many Somali workers. Child nutrition program Feeding Our Future diverted more than $250 million in funding as reimbursement for meals that were never distributed to children, according to Biden-era AG Merrick B. Garland, who called it the single largest pandemic relief fraud scheme. Still, this was just one among many other simultaneous fraud schemes, involving everything from fake autism therapy to fake homeless assistance. The decision of Gov. Tim Walz to end his reelection bid for the Minnesota governorship speaks to how deeply the issue has touched the voter base, even if aspects of it have been inflamed by partisan absurdity. At the end of the day, there’s still a very real fraud problem that was allowed to fester.

“Greedy people and businesses have learned how to exploit our programs,” said James Clark, the inspector general of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, to lawmakers in a hearing. “Fraud is the business model.”

Reminder: President Biden’s DOJ investigated the Minnesota fraud scheme and dozens of people have already been convicted: 78 indicted. 57 convicted (including founder Aimee Bock)

This is Aimee Bock. She is not Somali.

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— Brett Coughlin (@coughlinbrett.bsky.social) Dec 30, 2025 at 7:28 PM

But that–and I cannot stress this enough–is a thing happening in Minnesota, and the fact that it exists has less than zero relevance to a capricious decision by Trump and his administration to randomly strip social services funding in a state like California, or New York, or Colorado. A family that can’t afford child care in New York must be personally punished because fraud has happened (and has already been prosecuted) in Minnesota? A family with malnourished kids in Colorado can’t get assistance because someone LARPing as a journalist made a YouTube video claiming that childcare facilities are empty in Minneapolis? If Trump’s Department of Justice has wide-ranging indictments against nonprofits or charities to bring to bear against programs in those states, then they should go ahead and file them. But traditionally, we wait until actual criminal complaints have been made against programs before we unilaterally withhold money from them–and even in the case of Minnesota, how does fraud in one place automatically justify stripping funding from EVERY program in EVERY community? That’s always the grand irony of these things: The only people Donald Trump cares about less than blue residents of red states are red residents of blue states, those low-income rural, conservative Minnesotans who are now punished by the President for the crime of living too near to the people he more specifically wants to hurt. Sorry Trump voter, you live in a forsaken state. Good luck on your own!

What else would one expect from a President who personally approves FEMA funds for red states and then denies larger and more pressing claims for more destructive disasters in blue states? Trump has long since dispensed with even trying to pretend that his actions are driven by anything other than personal vengeance and misanthropy.

The way this clumsy wielding of the word “fraud” has been justified by talking heads and handwaved by GOP members of Congress likely lays bare the ultimate endgame of the Trump administration when it comes to national social safety net programs or Social Security: All can be stripped away, as long as you can convince right-wing America that by doing so, it will punish the people they’ve been told to hate. On the day that Social Security is nuked–or why not just stripped from anyone who is a registered Democrat with no explanation???–it will be met with choruses of MAGA cheers.